Another Bomber Goes To Jail

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the spring of 1963, after months of demonstrations, the Rev. Fred L.
Shuttlesworth, a Birmingham, Ala., civil rights leader, said the
city had reached "an accord with its conscience" with regard to
desegregating downtown department stores. But on a deeper level,
Birmingham's conscience and that of the nation have been haunted by
an event that occurred a few months later, on Sept. 15. A bomb
planted by members of the Ku Klux Klan at the 16th Street Baptist
Church killed four black girls Denise McNair, Carole Robertson,
Addie Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley during Sunday services. After
decades of delay, justice and conscience moved more closely into
accord on Tuesday, when a Birmingham jury convicted Thomas Blanton
Jr. of murdering those children.

Nothing can make up fully for the delay caused by decades of
fitful cooperation between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and
local law enforcement. But with the Blanton conviction, two of the
four main suspects have received life sentences. Robert Chambliss,
known locally as "Dynamite Bob," was convicted in 1977 and died in
prison in 1985. Those convictions send a powerful message that
succeeding generations of Southern prosecutors, such as Doug Jones,
the United States attorney in Birmingham, have not forgotten the
racial cases that had been either ignored or bungled. The
prosecution of the 16th Street case also stands as a tribute to the
dignified effort of Chris and Maxine McNair and Alpha Robertson,
parents of two of the victims, to keep the memory of the case
alive.

The prosecutorial history of the case is a tangled and
contentious one. J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. director, originally
blocked prosecution of the case in 1965, overruling his own agents
in Birmingham who had filed reports that Robert Chambliss, Thomas
Blanton, Bobby Frank Cherry and Herman Cash, now deceased, had
planted the bomb. The Chambliss conviction was secured by Bill
Baxley, then the Alabama attorney general, when the F.B.I. gave him
some of the files that Hoover had sat on. But as Mr. Baxley argues
in an article on the adjoining page, the bureau withheld information
supplied to Mr. Jones for the Blanton trial after the local F.B.I.
office reopened the case in 1993.

Mr. Baxley believes that with full access to the F.B.I. files he
could have brought Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry to trial
with Robert Chambliss in 1977. The passage of time erodes the
evidence and available testimony in any case, and that makes Doug
Jones's ability to prevail on the highly circumstantial case that
could be put together this year a striking achievement. He insisted
that the F.B.I. give him full access to 9,000 documents and tapes,
including the "kitchen tape" that probably sent Thomas Blanton to
jail. An F.B.I. listening device placed in the Klansman's kitchen in
1964 caught him telling his wife about planning and building "the
bomb."

Although the two prosecutors differ on their view of the F.B.I.'s
role, there are some striking connections between the trials. While
in law school, Mr. Jones, a white Alabamian raised only a few miles
from the bombed church, watched Mr. Baxley, another white Alabamian,
conduct the Chambliss trial. Racial tensions were still close to the
surface in Alabama in 1977, and that trial may have cost Mr. Baxley
his chance to be governor. But in both cases, it was a biracial jury
of Birmingham citizens that brought in speedy and stern
verdicts.

The lengthy complications can be viewed as cruelly frustrating,
but there is also room for the more positive point suggested by Doug
Jones on Tuesday. "Justice delayed is still justice," he said. A
Mississippi court's conviction in 1994 of Byron De La Beckwith in
the Medgar Evers murder and now the fact that 62-year-old Thomas
Blanton is headed for prison both show that a belated prosecution is
better than none at all.

There is one more chapter to be played out in the Birmingham
story. Bobby Frank Cherry, now 72, has been indicted for murder, but
was declared mentally incompetent to stand trial after a psychiatric
evaluation. Mr. Jones has secured an order by the trial judge, James
Garrett, to allow a second examination. Certainly Mr. Cherry's legal
rights have to be protected by the court. But if a new medical
opinion, expected in one to two months, allows the trial to go
forward, it is reassuring to know that the Birmingham of today has a
prosecutor ready for trial, a full bundle of F.B.I. evidence and
juries willing to reach a just verdict in a complicated
case.